1. Field of Invention
This application relates to the field of renewable energy generation and distribution by flying solar power-plants.
2. Prior Art
Rising fuel costs, dangerous reliance on foreign oil, and increasing rarity of new oil reserves have created an urgent demand for renewable energy technologies. One promising candidate is solar energy. A major drawback of ground-based solar energy farms, however, is that they are dependent to a large extent on the weather and climatic considerations. Geographical regions prone to frequent cloud cover experience less solar radiative flux due to the albedo of the clouds reflecting solar energy back into space. This coupled with the absorption of ultraviolet light by the ozone layer make ground-based solar power generation suboptimal for many locales.
Unfortunately for dense urban areas, where the need for electrical power is greater, real estate for the large number solar panels needed for megawatt level power generation is often unavailable or expensive making ground-based solar power stations impractical for cities. This problem is exacerbated in cities located on islands or other isolated locations where most of the electricity is generated using imported fossil fuels.
Cities are also vulnerable to rolling blackouts during hot summer months and other disruptions to their power supply. This is especially true in the wake of natural disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Such disasters typically disrupt the local power grid sometimes for weeks at a time. This severely hampers emergency response and disaster recovery operations. When coupled with road closures and other obstacles to the importation of generators and fuel into the area, costs of such operations escalate.
Similarly modern military operations in remote locales where a power grid is unavailable often need a large electrical power source to operate their instruments and equipment. Heretofore such operations required the hauling of heavy generators along with large quantities of fuel at high cost. In the case of recent wars, this involved fuel convoys that were frequently vulnerable to attack by ambush or improvised explosive devices even by technologically inferior forces.
In addition to these considerations, it is commonly known that the military has been developing directed energy weapons, electromagnetic rail guns, and other energy-intensive ordnance. The development of these new weapons system has been hampered by their large mass and relatively high energy requirements. This has limited the mobility of such weapon systems and made them expensive to operate. Therefore there is a clearly a need for large mobile solar power-plants that are able to fly anywhere, carry massive payloads, and deliver megawatt levels of electrical power.
There are very few pertinent references in the prior art as aerial alternative energy power beaming is a relatively new field where the necessary technology has only recently started to mature. The earliest reference to a related device was in U.S. Pat. No. 4,364,532 filed in 1979 by Stark who claimed a device called a balloon power station (BPS). Stark's BPS collected solar energy and used microwaves to transmit the power to the ground. While visionary for its time, Stark's BPS did not claim a method to store energy. Therefore Stark's BPS would be inoperable at night or under cloud cover.
Another related invention was in U.S. Pat. No. 4,534,525 filed in 1983 by Bliamptis. Bliamptis' invention was a vacuum balloon that performed essentially same function as Stark's BPS. It also suffered from the limitation that it did not have any means of storing energy. This is a serious limitation in a modern world that operates around the clock with wars and natural disasters that do not wait for sunny days. It is therefore the aim of the mobile aerial sustained solar power-plant to overcome this limitation as well as introduce some novel features that should boost the utility, efficiency, and overall practicality of aerial alternative energy power beaming.